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The truth about Malaysia

Lighthouse Independent Media this week took a decision to restructure the way our readers, sponsors, advertisers and partners are served in Malaysia with highly experienced regional leadership based out of Singapore now managing our Malaysian products.

Yesterday the difficult decision was made to close the physical presence of Lighthouse Independent Media Sdh Bhd in Kuala Lumpur after six years. This unfortunately saw the redundancy of 14 people in the Kuala Lumpur office, including some long serving and loyal friends of Lighthouse who were informed in person by the senior executive team.

We arrived in Malaysia with an entrenched incumbent who proceeded to use every method to try and stop us competing in a fair market way including the most unethical tactic of trademark squatting. However in print, online and live events we continually out performed all competitors and will continue to do so.

Our brands Advertising + Marketing and Human Resources Malaysia are the market leaders and will continue to be.

Here are the current Effective Measure audience statistics for the marketing/media category in the online space:

Marketing-interactive.com (unique browsers): 12,923

Campaignasia.com (unique browsers): 2,987

Marketingmagazine.com.my (unique browsers) 1 – tags likely to have been removed but recent months have looked like this:

Jul 2013, 6,443

Aug 2013: 6,967

Sept 2013: 7,269

Oct 2013: 703

This is clear proof we are achieving our critical goal for the media, marketing, agency and online communities to demand more of the media that covers them and to provide an excellent high quality vehicle for advertisers to reach a highly desirable, intelligent and qualified audience.

Meanwhile humanreosurcesonline.net saw 8,342 unique visitors from Malaysia in January, and we are not aware of any HR-industry media brand that comes close in the Malaysian HR community.

Our conferences and awards business in Malaysia has rapidly grown in step with our other markets, with in excess of 500 attendees at the highly respected Malaysia chapter of the Agency of the Year awards gala annual. The recently launched Marketing Excellence Awards is fast catching up and now sees 300 attendees with 70% of those senior marketers and our MobEx awards for mobile marketing excellence – already wildly successful in Hong Kong and Singapore – is our next rapid growth awards program in Malaysia.

Last year we launched the HR Excellence Awards Malaysia which saw 375 HR directors attend to pick up their trophies and we’re expecting a big increase during this year’s awards.

We will shortly be announcing a number of other awards and conferences for our Malaysia audiences and clients, as we continue to leverage these market leader brands.
Why we closed the physical office

The Malaysia office had a deep dependence on the print and online businesses and with leadership which was unable to arrest the losses, it was starting to impact the other profitable and fast growth parts of the business, in Singapore and Hong Kong. Hence the transformation of the way we manage Malaysia.

“To see the office itself close is sad as I was there at the start and we feel deeply sorry for our staff who were made redundant, but this new approach is necessary to ensure we remain market leader and can give our clients and readers our full attention,” Tony Kelly, managing director, Lighthouse Independent Media said today.
Resourcing smart growth

Singapore this year has seen numerous large and small scale events launched, as well as a new research division, which is very active in Malaysia already. We have also been resourcing our own in-house engineering team based out of the Singapore office which was pivotal in launching the new marketing-interactive.com and is working on new launches for all markets Lighthouse operates in.

In Hong Kong Lighthouse has had a stunning year of revenue and profit growth, increasing the size of our business fivefold in 20 months and necessitating us to move to bigger offices again later this year. We will shortly be announcing a new launch in the Hong Kong market which will roll out second half of 2014.

As part of the changes to the Malaysia business Mike Parsons has been appointed to the role of publisher, Malaysia & Singapore, Human Resources Magazine to take charge of everyday management of the Human Resources Malaysia products.